V. I. Lenin

Letter To The Fifth

All-Russia Congress Of Trade Unions[1]

Written:17 Deptember, 1922First Published:Published inTrudon September 18, 1922 and inPravdaNo. 210 on September 19, 1922; Published according to the manuscriptSource:Lenin’sCollected Works, 2nd English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965,Volume 33, pages 368-369Translated:David Skvirsky and George HannaTranscription\HTML Markup:David Walters&R. CymbalaCopyleft:V. I. Lenin Internet Archive (www.marx.org) 2002. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of theGNU Free Documentation License

September 17, 1922

Dear Comrades,

This is the first time since my long illness that I am able to address a
    Congress, even though in writing. Permit me, therefore, to confine myself to
    expressing to you my cordial greetings, and to a few brief remarks on the
    position and tasks of our industry and of our Republic. Our position is
    particularly difficult because we lack the means to restore our fixed
    assets, i.e., machinery, tools, buildings, etc.; and it is precisely that
    part of industry known as heavy industry which is the main basis of
    socialism. In capitalist countries these fixed assets are usually restored
    by means of loans. We are refused loans until we restore the property of the
    capitalists and landowners; but this we cannot and will not do. The only
    road open to us is the long and extremely arduous road of slowly
    accumulating our savings, of raising taxes in order to be able gradually to
    repair our destroyed railways, machinery, buildings, etc. So far, we are the
    only country in the world in which the working peasants, under the
    leadership of the workers, are building socialism, flatly rejecting the
    leadership of the bour-geoisie who, under cover of florid phrases about
    democracy, liberty, etc., are actually consolidating the private owner-ship
    of the capitalists and landowners and establishing the rule of a handful of
    rich men who have divided the entire globe among themselves and are fighting
    one another for its redivision, for the enslavement of hundreds of millions
    of people in the weaker and more backward nations.

As long as we remain in the field alone the task of restoring our economy
    will be an extremely heavy burden on our shoulders. All the peasants and all
    the workers will have to exert themselves to the very utmost; our machinery
    of state, which is still working very inefficiently, must be improved and
    made less costly so that we may improve the conditions of the working
    people, and, to some extent at least, restore our economy, which was
    destroyed by the imperialist and civil wars.

Let every politically conscious peasant and worker who may become
    despondent over our hard conditions of life, or over the extremely slow
    progress of our work of state construction, remember the recent past, when
    the capital-ists and landowners were in power. This will give him new zest
    in his work. The only way to save the workers’ and peasants’
    rule is to make every effort to intensify and improve our work in all
    fields.

With comradely greetings,

V. Ulyanov (Lenin)

[1]TheFilth All-Russia Congress of Trade Unionswas held in Moscow on
    September 17-22, 1922. It was attended by 970 delegates representing
    5,100,000 trade union members. The Congress elected Lenin an honorary member
    of its presidium. Lenin's letter was	read at the first sitting on
    September 17, 1922. The Congress sent Lenin greetings in reply.